Simon Dach (1605–59) was a professor of poetry and the finest member of the Königsberg circle, a company of Prussian theologians, scientists, and poets. He also knew affliction from the inside: he fought tuberculosis, lived among deadly epidemics, and watched the war between Sweden and Poland ravage his region, so that most of his single publications were poetic memorials for the dead. This text, Ich bin bei Gott in Gnaden, was one of them. It appeared in 1651 with a five-part setting by Heinrich Albert, organist of the Königsberg cathedral, and Albert’s score names the occasion: it was written at the death of Baron Achatius of Dohna (1581–1647), a much-traveled nobleman who had served as governor to the future King Frederick V and undertaken several diplomatic missions before circumstances turned against him. He retired to Prussia and was imprisoned twice by the Poles before he died. Written for a man who died a prisoner, the hymn leans hard on Romans 8:35–39: the first stanza announces peace with God through Christ, the second names want, pain, famine, peril, flood, and foe as powerless to separate the sheep from the Shepherd, and the rest add even the powers of hell to that list. August Crull’s English translation first appeared in The Lutheran Witness in 1882.